(The Guardian)- At least three people have been killed and eight injured after a truck drove into pedestrians in a busy shopping area of central Stockholm, according to police.
Officers said they were treating the incident as terror-related and the prime minister, Stefan Löfven, said everything indicated it was a terror attack.
The capital was immediately locked down as police set up barricades, suspended public transport and told people to avoid the city centre. Police later evacuated the central train station close to where the attack took place. The country’s national rail company said all train services to the capital had been cancelled for the day.
Photos on social media showed the truck crashed into the corner of the Ahlens upmarket shopping centre with its cab on fire.
Swedish police showed a picture of a person they said was of interest in connection with the attack. Mats Lofving, head of Swedish police’s National Operations Department (NOA) said the picture, which appeared to be CCTV footage, was taken close to the time of the incident, in the vicinity of the attack.
“I have a picture of a person who has been seen at the location at this point in time. We want to get in contact with this person,” he told a news conference.
Witnesses reported people screaming and fleeing from the scene. There were also reports of gunfire, but these have not been confirmed. Hundreds of people were seen in video footage fleeing Sweden’s largest pedestrianised street.
“We were in a store. It crashed into a window a few metres away,” one person told the Swedish broadcaster SVT. “I heard glass breaking and screams. There are a lot of police and people everywhere.”
A witness named as Anna told local Aftonbladet news: “I saw hundreds of people run – they ran for their lives. I turned and ran as well.”
Two videos emerged on social media that appeared to show two different people being detained in the area, but police said no one had been arrested in connection with the attack.
A witness named only as Nasrin, who came to Sweden from Syria a decade ago, cried as she told what she had seen.
“I was terrified, I am still shaking. I saw a woman who had lost her legs. It could have been me,” she told SVT. “The truck went at high speed – it crushed everything in its path. In the beginning we thought it was an explosion because of the loud sounds.
“When we went outside we saw that everything had been shattered … I try to keep hope but I do not know how I feel any more. It seems that there is no hope left for mankind.”
The truck, a delivery vehicle belonging to the brewery Spendrups, was hijacked earlier in the day. The company confirmed it was stolen on Friday morning when a man jumped into the cab and drove it away.
SVT talked to a witness who saw the truck driving at speed towards the Åhlens department store on Drottninggatan. “He mowed down eight people there and I saw four bodies a little further away,” the witness said. “A woman with a small child became completely paralysed and just stood still. I grabbed her and another woman and threw us all into a stairwell.”
Police also confirmed shots were fired at another location, according to media reports. When the truck drove into the crowd, a man fled carrying a weapon, according to a reporter at the scene.
In recent years, several hundred young Swedes have travelled to Syria to join Isis, making Sweden one of the main sources of European recruits to the Islamist group.
If the event is confirmed to be a terrorist attack, it will be the first in Sweden since an Iraqi-born Swedish man exploded two bombs in Stockholm in 2010, one of which killed him. No one else was injured.
The incident comes two months after the US president, Donald Trump, was widely ridiculed for referring to a non-existent terror attack in Sweden.
Although Sweden was peaceful before Friday’s attack, Trump’s remarks had prompted a fierce debate over the consequences of the country’s open-door refugee policy in 2015 which saw 163,000 people claim asylum after fleeing wars in the Middle East, north Africa and Afghanistan.
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